Gazillions of flower photographs have been made and are still being made every day. Flowers have been a favorite motive for photographers ever since photography existed.

So, I thought to myself: How could I make something new, something about flowers that has not been done before? Would it be possible to create photographs of flowers that have not been made before in one way or another ?

Impossible ? Maybe, maybe not.

So I did what I often do when trying to solve an ‘artistic problem’. I looked closer and closer and closer !

What I discovered blew me away. I found great beauty inside the calyx of a flower.

All fine-art photographs from the CALYX series:

click on an image to enlarge

The Story behind the photographs

How could I get inside the Calicies of flowers with my camera ?

One way would be using techniques of macro photography. But this field of photography has been overdone and beaten to death…

I did not want to do that.

Sorry, I need to get technical for a moment.

All photographers know this dreaded moment when you want to get closer to an object only to find out that you are below the minimum focus distance of the lens you are using.

For non-photographers: Every lens has a minimum focusing distance and if you try to get closer than this minimum distance you cannot make the object you want to photograph to become in focus (sharp). Depending on the lens this can be as close as 20 centimeters or as far as a few meters.

I remembered that I have one particular camera / lens in my arsenal that has Zero focusing distance. That means I can put your object right in front of the lens and still achieve focus.

Yeah, I know some photographers reading this are shaking their head in disbelieve. I also did not know that such a lens exists. But it does!

I leave it up to you to figure out what lens / equipment I have been using here. Simply follow me on 500px and see my gear list there.

Fortunately, that very lens is very small and it allowed me to wrap the calices of flowers around it.

In other words to put the flower right onto the lens. So all the light which falls onto the photograph is not direct light, but light that comes through the walls of a flowers calyx.

This light coming from behind and filtered through the walls of the flower being photographed added to the visual appeal of the photographs.

Fortunately, there is an abundance of beautiful flowers to be found everywhere in Bali. So over a period of a few weeks I searched for asuitable flowers and made close to 1000 photographs.